Digital Drills: The Monster Machines that Mine Bitcoin

The all-out race for power isn't just some sort of freak side-effect of Bitcoin's surging popularity, though. It's actually built right into how Bitcoins come into existence. The cryptographic hashes miners need to solve to mine Bitcoins weren't easy to begin with, and they only get harder as miners throw more and more collective computing power at them. Bitcoin self-regulates its difficulty so that there's always just a trickle, one block of coins mined every ten minutes. No matter what. So it's not about the quantity of power you've got, but rather your proportion of the whole. You've got to keep up with the Joneses.